I've spent almost my entire career as a journalist covering tech in and around Silicon Valley, meeting entrepreneurs, executives and engineers, watching companies rise and fall (or in the case of Apple, rise, fall and rise again) and attending confabs and conferences. Before joining Forbes in February 2012, I had a very brief stint in corporate communications at HP (on purpose) and worked for more than six years on the tech team at Bloomberg News, where I dived into the financial side of tech. Before that, I was Silicon Valley bureau chief for Interactive Week, a contributor to Wired and Upside, and a reporter and news editor for MacWeek. The first computer game I ever played was Zork, my collection of now-vintage tech T-shirts includes a tie-dye BMUG classic and a HyperCard shirt featuring a dog and fire hydrant. When I can work at home, I settle into the black Herman Miller Aeron chair that I picked up when NeXT closed its doors. You can email me at cguglielmo@forbes.com.

Apple Loop: The Week in Review

Catching you up on some of the things that happened around Apple this past week.

Apple’s “mind-boggling” results: As the shares went on a roller coaster ride, with prognosticators prognosticating that Apple’s run was over, the company reported second quarter numbers that blew past analyst estimates on huge demand for the iPhone, notably in China. Apple said it sold 35.1 million iPhones, 11.8 million iPads and 4 million Macs in the quarter ending in March. (Analysts were predicting sales of 31 to 32 million iPhones, 12-13 million iPads and about 4 million Macs.) Profit rose 94 percent (that’s not a typo) on a 59 percent jump in revenue. CEO Tim Cook said sales in China were “mind boggling” at $7.9 billion, which brings the total for the first half of fiscal 2012 to $12.4 billion in China. That compares to $13.3 billion sales in China for all of last year. He also said that the company had no interest in coming up with a new device that merges the MacBook Air and iPad, like some of its rivals have done. “You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user.” I agree. I do not want cold toast.

Ka-ching. Apple now has $110.2 billion in cash and securities, up from $97.6 billion a quarter earlier. As my colleague Eric Savitz noted, that’s an increase of $138.2 million a day or $5.75 million an hour or $96,000 a minute or about $1,600 a second. Now, they’re going to spend some of that haul — about $45 billion — on dividends and stock buybacks, but that’s still a lot of cash. Not to mention, the money they’re generating every minute in addition to that. Now that’s mind boggling.

Apple = Sony. Baloney? Forrester Research CEO George Colony raised a lot of hackles, and debate, with a blog post saying that “Apple will decline in the post Steve Jobs era” because it’s a charismatic organization and that kind of thinking can’t just be passed on. “Like Sony (post Morita), Polaroid (post Land), Apple circa 1985 (post Jobs), and Disney (in the 20 years post Walt Disney), Apple will coast, and then decelerate.” Needless to say, not everyone agreed with Colony’s take, including longtime Apple analyst and fan Tim Bajarin: “This is very wrong thinking. Jobs went to great pains to instill in his management team his vision, the Apple culture and made sure they have a rich ecosystem to build on for generations. They also live on the mantra that says only build the best products of the category they dare to innovate in and do not stray from that. Apple has long gone past its cult status. It is now meeting the needs of a mass market audience and as long as they keep cranking out insanely great products, which Johnny Ives and team is more than capable of delivering, Apple will continue to confound its critics and competitors.” We all can probably guess what Steve Jobs would say about this kind of debate. I just can’t print it here.

Steve Jobs and the Chocolate Factory: A new book by Ken Segall, an ad executive at Chiat/Day who worked with Jobs and Apple for more than a decade, called Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success has tons of fun stories for Apple fans. Among them: Jobs, drumming up sales for the then new iMac, had an idea to get people buying the new machine by including a golden ticket in the one millionth iMac and giving the lucky finder a refund on their sale and win a trip to the the Apple campus, with Jobs dressing up just like Willy Wonka (top hat and tails) to give the tour. Segall said the idea was nixed because California law doesn’t allow companies to force customers to buy something in order to be entered into a contest. “”He was cool in that he would come into a meeting and say he had this idea, but his ideas didn’t always go anywhere,” Segall said. Other tidbits from the book: Jobs hated the initial iPod “silhouette” ads because they weren’t like all the other Apple ads — white pages with a product image and clever headline. “In that sense, it was ‘off brand.’

Mike Daisey: ‘Liar, fabulist, charlatan.’ Those were some of the words Mike Daisey used to describe himself at his alma mater, Colby College, this past week. Daisey, class of 1996, was there to perform his show “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” a monologue in which he talks about Apple and his efforts to bring attention to working conditions at the Chinese factories were iPads and iPhones are made. Daisey, you may recall, got into a spot of bother last month when journalist Ira Glass of the This American Life radio show learned that Daisey hadn’t been telling the truth when he was interviewed for piece on Apple recorded in January. Daisey acknowledged he lied, but said it’s because he’s a storyteller and not a journalist. What did he have to say about the whole brouhaha? “The producers of ‘This American Life’ chose to view it as journalism,” he said. “I did not disabuse them of that notion.” Yeah, that part we got.

Hey, maybe those jobs can come back. In a 25-page report called “Apple Business Model: Financialization across the Pacific,” a group of researchers at The University of Manchester’s Center for Research on Socio-Cultural Change argues that Apple could manufacture iPhones in the U.S. affordably if it wanted to. That counters comments that Steve Jobs made to President Obama that Apple factories in the U.S. weren’t feasible and that those manufacturing jobs “aren’t coming back to the U.S.” Said the researchers: “If Apple were willing to accept lower margins and the 8 hours of assembly labor on the iPhone were on-shore and paid at U.S. rates, Apple would still have a gross margin of nearly 50 percent.” The research is based on data from Apple and Foxconn, which supplies the low-cost manpower that Apple currently relies on.

Apple Campus 2 — more than just a pretty place to work: Lots more details are emerging about what exactly the new Apple campus in Cupertino, California, to be built on land formerly owned by Hewlett-Packard, will look like and offer. This past week, the Cupertino Planning Commission gave its approval to a 21,468-square foot cafeteria that will serve employees only. Designers are also debating the design of the new campus, which looks like…well, let’s just call it a ring of metal and glass. The campus will have 2.8 million square feet of office space, house 12,000 workers and be spread across a 175 acres. Clog, a quarterly magazine on design, devoted its entire second issue to Apple.

Ireland, Oregon and Austin, oh my. Apple, which counts its offices in Cork, Ireland as its European headquarters, said it will add 500 employees there over the next 18 months and build a new three-story office building to accommodate the extra staff. Apple, which has had an office there for 30 years, currently employs 2,800 workers in Cork. No word on how big the cafeteria there will be…Apple this week also said it will pay a “project fee” of $150,000 a year to two counties in central Oregon where it plans to build a new data center that will add at least 35 jobs. In return, Apple gets a 15-year property tax exemption on the 160 acres that it bought in February for $5.6 million…Also, also, The Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce said today that Apple’s plans to build a new campus in Austin, Texas, may be “in peril” because of concerns over the incentive offers from state and local governments, which the International Business Times reports was estimated between $35 to $36 million over 10 to 15 years. Apple has had offices in Austin for 20 years, with 3,600 new jobs planned for its support team/help desk.

Ciao! Ferrari President Luca di Montezemolo, in Silicon Valley to speak at Stanford University’s View From the Top lecture series, sat down with Tim Cook to talk about their brands. Di Montezemolo told students that Apple and Ferrari shared a focus on simplicy, design and “passion for product” and said that each pays “attention to the brand, exclusivity, attention to the people, attention to the environment” by running their companies from a central location. Like Jobs, Di Montezemolo said he took over Ferrari when it was in financial trouble in 1991 and then went on to rebuild the brand.

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